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Best Mother's Day gift? A bunch of paid links

Yesterday was Mother's Day, but the flower companies that cash in on special occasions apparently weren't just delivering flowers to mom.

According to the New York Times, Teleflora, FTD, 1800Flowers and ProFlowers were busy delivering paid links to Google in an effort to boost their rankings.

As the New York Times details, "all four [companies] have links on websites that are riddled with paid links, many
of which include phrases like “mothers day flowers,” “mothers day
arrangements” and “cheap mothers day flowers.” Anyone who clicks on
those backlinks, as they are known, gets sent to the floral retailer who
paid for them".

The goal, of course, is not to generate clicks from these links themselves; the goal of paid links is to boost Google rankings.

Some of the 6,000 links the New York Times sent to Google fit the typical profile of a paid link:

Several appear on RickeyPearce.com,
which until Friday featured a stock photo of a goateed man in a blue
shirt — it is an image found all over the Internet — and a bunch of
blandly written entries on topics like mortgages, car leasing and
insurance, all of which contain links to corporate sponsors. An entry in
March titled “Finding the Best Mothers Day Gifts Online” contained
three links to Teleflora’s web site.

So what does Google think of this? Interestingly, Google told the New York Times that "None of the links shared by The New York Times had a significant impact
on our rankings, due to automated systems we have in place to assess the
relevance of links".

The New York Times questions this, based on an analysis by Searchmetrics, which found that Teleflora's ranking appears to have increased following its link buying campaign.

This notwithstanding, Google's statement is particularly strange given that company has recently penalized a number of major retailers when their paid link shenanigans were exposed. Here, Google is apparently content leaving it to the algorithm, despite the fact that one website owner who has a "mothers day flowers" link to FTD on her homepage admitted to the New York Times that she's being paid $30/month for the link.

This once again calls into question Google's enforcement of its guidelines. Even if Google's algorithm is capable of filtering out 'bad' links without manual intervention, it seems that not all violators are treated equally.

Just when it appeared that Google was serious about sending a message that major companies are not above its guidelines, it now sends a message, intentionally or not, that that's not always the case.

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Comments (3)

Considering how hard J.C. Penny was penalized when their link building scheme was uncovered, it does seem unusual that Google wouldn't go after these companies guilty of buying links. However, the article mentions that Google checked out the links uncovered by the NYT, and determined that they had not affected the search rankings. Did Google not penalize these sites because their scheme failed?

Google had , at least in the UK, seemed to move away from the public side of "link-busting" , opting for silent fitlers over public humiliation as with Gocompare a few years back.

If the NYT keep covering this, along with the rest of the mainstream media, they might well be forced to change their view. At the moment their algorithm's use & dependency on links is known by own a tiny tech circle, but this could make it a PR issue.

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